Political leaders who appeal to noisy activists lose elections (I sincerely hope so in this instance)
KEVIN Rudd was in Western Australia yesterday talking to mining industry executives who oppose his resource super-profits tax. It was very little, very late. Instead of talking to them first, as Hawke government resources minister Peter Walsh, involved in the creation of the petroleum resources rent tax, says he should have, the Prime Minister first sold the RSPT to class-war warriors who hope capitalism is about to collapse. It is hard to imagine a better way of appealing to unionists who think every employer is an enemy and environmental activists who think all mining is vandalism. Sound familiar? It should. In the lead-up to the 2004 election, Labor leader Mark Latham got stuck into the Tasmanian timber industry, thinking a strong stand against logging would give him an election winning lock on the left-wing vote. It did not work then, and it will not work now.
What Mr Latham missed was the way people in the industry, unionists and self-employed both, did not like a Labor leader risking their jobs to win the votes of inner-city greens. When John Howard promised at a meeting in Launceston to protect timber-getters, timber workers cheered him to the rafters. It illustrated two fundamental laws of Australian politics. First, elections are decided in the sensible centre, where ideology is eschewed and people assess politicians' promises on what they mean for them now and how they will help the young people they love in the future. Second, critics of capitalism are loud, but few in number.
Mr Rudd is making the same mistakes. The old-guard Left love him taking a rhetorical shovel to the miners, and the Prime Minister undoubtedly hopes the RSPT will produce barrels of cash to spend in marginal seats, especially in crucial Queensland Labor electorates, home to significant numbers of miners. And attacking mining magnates goes down well with the greens. But whatever Mr Rudd does will never be enough for the green extreme. And the Prime Minister overestimates the strength, and unity of the union movement. Despite the ACTU campaign against the Howard government's Work Choices policy, Australians have rejected unions with archaic ideas of class conflict. In the productive private sector, 86 per cent of workers are not union members. In keeping clear of the comrades, they obviously understand their jobs now and superannuation payouts in the future depend on the economy expanding, rather than on government and unions using the tax system to redistribute wealth. The idea of mining union members risking their futures for the Prime Minister's cause is also more than a little unlikely.
But sometimes Mr Rudd seems more interested in grand gestures than carefully calibrated reform. In his first speech to parliament in 1998, he said politics should not be a competition for "some mythical place called the 'centre' ". In essays in 2006 and again last year, he presented politics as a struggle between good social democrats and corrupt capitalism. He obviously assumes people see his fight with the miners as a moral struggle. Some do, but opinion polls show most do not. Pragmatic Australians, especially the vast majority whose living standards improved under Mr Howard, want to see the economy expand and they know that requires realistic reform, not ideology. At the moment, many must wonder whether Mr Rudd understands what the majority in the centre wants.
